BusinessDay 11 Feb 2018

Sunday 11 February 2018
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IAN BURUMA
Buruma, editor of The New York
Review of Books, is the author of
numerous books, including Murder in
Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van
Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.
Chuck Close is an
American artist,
famous for painting
large portraits.
Severely paralyzed,
Close is confined to a wheelchair.
Former models have accused
him of asking them to take their
clothes off and of using sexual
language that made them feel
harassed. This behavior prompted
the National Gallery in Washington,
DC, to cancel a planned
show of Close’s work. And Seattle
University has removed a
self-portrait by the artist from a
university building.
If we were to remove all the art
from museums or galleries because
we disapproved of the artists’ behavior,
great collections would soon
be severely depleted. Rembrandt
cruelly mistreated his mistress,
Picasso was beastly to his wives,
Caravaggio lusted after young boys
and was a murderer, and so on.
And what about literature? Céline
was a vicious anti-Semite. Wil-
Moralism and the arts
liam S. Burroughs shot his wife in a
drunken haze, and Norman Mailer
stabbed one of his. And movie directors?
Forget sexually inappropriate
language: Erich von Stroheim shot
mass orgies for his own pleasure.
Charlie Chaplin liked very young
girls. And then there is Woody Allen,
accused of but never charged
with molesting his seven-year-old
adopted daughter.
The New York Times movie critic
A.O. Scott wrote an interesting article
about this. He grew up idolizing
Allen. To a bookish young man, Allen,
the anxious intellectual who still gets
the girl, was a kind of role model. But
now that we know the accusations
against the comedian and movie director,
we are forced, in Scott’s view,
to reappraise the work in that light.
There may be something sinister and
immoral in the films that we should
take into account.
In other words, bad behavior, or
even alleged bad behavior, can taint
an artistic work, because the artist
cannot be separated from his art.
This is at least a more interesting
proposition than the notion that art
should be disqualified just because
we don’t like the way the artist behaved
in private. But is it right?
Oscar Wilde famously said that
there is no such thing as an immoral
book, just well or badly written
books. This is open to challenge.
There is a moral component to most
forms of human expression, including
art.
Moral depravity can make for
bad art. This may be one reason
why there are so few examples of
good Nazi art. Racial hatred was
morally reprehensible in a way that
Communist idealism, for example,
was not. Sergei Eisenstein made
Communist propaganda films, but
these are also great works of art.
Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda
films are technically astonishing, but
otherwise repellent.
It is also true that art can transcend
the private behavior of the
artist. A writer, filmmaker, or painter
who behaves badly toward wives or
lovers can produce art that is deeply
sympathetic to women. By the same
token, perfectly behaved people
can break all kinds of social taboos
in their art. To judge the moral component
of artistic expression, then,
we must look not at the person who
made it but at the work itself.
Last year, an online petition with
8,000 signatures asked the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New
York to remove a famous painting
by Balthus, showing an adolescent
girl sitting on a chair with a patch
of her underwear showing. To see
this as a form of child pornography,
or “the objectification of children,”
as the signatories did, seems highly
dubious. Balthus was moved by the
dreaminess of girls on the cusp of
adulthood. But even if Balthus, in his
private life, was attracted to young
women, there is nothing in the painting
that suggests moral depravity
or abuse.
The same can be said about Allen’s
movies, whatever the truth
may be about his alleged misdeeds.
It is no secret that Allen finds young
women attractive; his current wife
was not yet 20 when he started an
affair with her. She was also the adopted
daughter of Allen’s partner at
the time. One of Allen’s best known
and most successful films, “Manhattan,”
released in 1979, when he was
in his forties, featured a relationship
between a middle-aged man (Allen)
and a young girl, played by Mariel
Hemingway, who was 16 at the time
of filming.
These relationships were unconventional.
Some might find them
creepy. But this is not the same as molesting
a child. Nor is there anything
in “Manhattan,” or any other film by
Allen, that reveals any interest in assaulting
young children. This would
be the case even if everything alleged
against the director were true.
Again, morality is not irrelevant.
It is hard to imagine admiring art that
espouses child abuse, racial hatred,
or torture (even though this seems
to get people much less agitated
than sexual content). But just as we
should not condemn a work of art
because of the artist’s private behavior,
we should also be careful about
applying norms of social respectability
to artistic expression. Some
art is meant to provoke, transgress,
and push boundaries. People can do
things in works of imagination that
they would never do in life.
That is the way it should be. If we
limited artistic expression to subjects
that are commonly regarded as
socially respectable, we would soon
be left with moralistic kitsch, just the
kind of thing rulers of authoritarian
states like to promote in public, while
doing things that are far worse than
most artists would like to imagine.
©: Project Syndicate
Abia’s renewed efforts in healthcare delivery
OKECHUKWU KESHI UKEGBU
Ukegbu writes from Umuahia.
There is every hope that
Abia State’s strides in the
health sector will be redoubled
this year. The state is
poised to reshape its comprehensive,
integrated Healthcare Delivery
Framework as well as secondary
health care centres by ensuring
that every local government area
has a functional and better-staffed
general hospital, which will serve
as outreach base to primary health
centres and minimize the distance
and stress involved in accessing
tertiary hospitals.
Also, efforts are on the speed
lane to commission the state’s
specialist hospital for child and
maternal care, which is designed to
ensure that no child is lost at birth in
Abia State from 2018. The specialist
hospital deserves more emphasis
because of its importance. Infant
mortality rate, which is the number
of infant deaths for every 1,000 live
births, is disturbing.
Abia has made robust efforts
to ensure that this menace is put
at bay. Last year, the state through
its Ministry of Health, the Nestle
Nutrition Institute of Africa, the
Nigeria Society of Neonatal Medicine,
and Vicar Hope Foundation
held a workshop which trained
100 primary health care personnel
in Abia State on the skills of “Helping
Babies Breathe”. The training
enhanced the knowledge of the
participants to help to drastically
reduce neonatal asphyxia and infant
mortality in the state. The trainees
included doctors, midwives, nurses
and community health extension
workers drawn from private and
government hospitals and primary
health care centres, especially those
in the rural areas where the need is
greater. The training came on the
heels of listing the state among six
other states to benefit in funding
the reduction of maternal and infant
mortality and morbidity.
Neonatal asphyxia, also known as
perinatal asphyxia or birth asphyxia,
is a medical condition resulting from
deprivation of oxygen to a newborn
infant that lasts long enough during
the birth process to cause physical
harm, usually to the brain. Medical
experts define neonatal resuscitation
as the intervention after a baby
is born to help it breathe and to help
its heart beat. This is because some
babies need help with establishing
their air flow, breathing, or circulation,
and this intervention takes the form
of helping them with airway, breathing,
and circulation, also known as
the ABCs. Before a baby is born, the
placenta provides oxygen and nutrition
to the blood and removes carbon
dioxide. After a baby is born, the lungs
provide oxygen to the blood and remove
carbon dioxide. The transition
from using the placenta to using the
lungs for gas exchange begins when
the umbilical cord is clamped or tied
off, and the baby has its first breath.
Many babies go through this transition
without needing intervention.
Besides, in Nigeria, neonatal death
(death of infant within the first 28 days
of life), is 48 per 1000 live births and
almost half of infant death per annum
results from poor maternal health and
poor care at time of delivery, according
to NDHS Report 2003. The major
causes of these deaths are asphyxia,
preterm, sepsis, neonatal tetanus,
congenital conditions, diarrhea and
others. It is also noted that globally,
about one quarter of all neonatal
deaths are caused by birth asphyxia.
Therefore, effective resuscitation at
birth can prevent a large proportion
of these deaths.
The Healthcare Outreach to the
aged and vulnerable groups in Abia,
a novel programme, will be strengthened
and positioned this year to
touch more lives. The importance
of this health-care outreach cannot
be over-emphasised because of
the special place vulnerable groups
occupy in our society. Vulnerable
groups are groups who for some reasons
are weak and vulnerable to human
rights abuses. These groups are
structurally discriminated against.
And for this reason, they require
special protection for the equal and
effective enjoyment of their human
rights. They include women and
girls, children, refugees, internally
displaced persons, stateless persons,
national minorities, migrant
workers, disabled persons, elderly
persons, HIV positive persons and
AIDS victims, among others.
During his campaign, Governor
Okezie Ikpeazu promised to provide
effective and efficient healthcare
services to all Abia people, in every
part of the state, strengthen the
710 government-owned healthcare
centres by improving their infrastructure,
funding and improving
the quality of healthcare professionals
deployed in them, and partner
world-class healthcare providers to
train personnel and provide complimentary
infrastructure. He has not
reneged on his promise.
As such, Abia’s strides in the health
sector have attracted the attention of
multi-nationals such as MTN. These
strides include the upgrading of
the School of Midwifery at Abiriba,
School of Nursing at Aba, Umuahia
and Amachara which prompted their
reaccreditation by the Midwifery
and Nursing Council of Nigeria, approval
of funds for the construction
of four 100-bed general hospitals at
Okeipke, Arochukwu and Obingwa,
upgrade of Departments of Paediatrics,
Radiology, Surgery, Obstetrics
& Gynaecology, Cardiotomography,
Ophthalmology, and Anesthesia at
Abia State University, the proposed
Super Tertiary Medical Facility at
Obuaku, which is going to change the
narrative in medical tourism, among
others.
Others are the “Save One Million
Lives” campaign which targets
one million under 5 children and
women within their child-bearing
ages, establishment of tuberculosis
reference laboratory for the entire
South-East region at Amachara
Specialist Hospital, 102 therapeutic
centres, 42 microscopy centres, as
well as two gene experts’ machines
in the state for diagnosis in the treatment
of tuberculosis.
The establishment of state-ofthe-art
Sickle Diagnosis and Treatment
Centre through the instrumentality
of Vicar Hope Foundation, the
pet project of Mrs. Nkechi Ikpeazu,
the wife of Abia State governor, deserves
mention here. The diagnosis
and treatment centre will offer a
huge relief to sickle cell patients by
providing treatment at a subsidised
rate. The disease has posed a serious
concern to humankind as millions of
people around the world, adults as
well as children, suffer from it. WHO
describes it as a potentially fatal disease
and one of the main causes of
premature death amongst under-5
children in various African countries.
The disease, which is regarded
as a major genetic disease in most
countries in sub-Saharan Africa, is a
genetic blood disorder that affects
the haemoglobin within the red
blood cells. The recurrent pain and
complications caused by the disease
can interfere with many aspects of
the patient’s life, including education,
employment and psychosocial
development. The sickle-cell trait
is now known to be widespread,
reaching its highest prevalence in
parts of Africa as well as among
people with origins in equatorial
Africa, the Mediterranean basin and
Saudi Arabia. In Africa, the highest
prevalence of sickle-cell trait occurs
between latitudes 15° North
and 20° South, ranging between
10 percent and 40 percent of the
population in some areas.
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